[salamanderman]

I had a frustrating number of job interviews in my early career where the interviewers didn't know what realtime actually was. That "and predictable delay" concept from the article frequently seemed to be lost on many folks, who seemed to think realtime just meant fast, whatever that means.

[mort96]

I would even remove the "minimum" part altogether; the point of realtime is that operations have predictable upper bounds. That might even mean slower average cases than in non-realtime systems. If you're controlling a car's braking system, "the average delay is 50ms but might take up to 80ms" might be acceptable, whereas "the average delay is 1ms but it might take arbitrarily long, possibly multiple seconds" isn't.

[ska]

The old saying "real time" /= "real fast". Hard vs "soft" realtime muddies things a bit, but I think it's probably the majority of software developers don't really understand what realtime actually is either.